r-hub/sysreqsdb

Name: sysreqsdb

Owner: The R-hub project of the R Consortium

Description: SystemRequirements mappings for R packages

Created: 2015-03-27 21:02:29.0

Updated: 2018-01-09 21:12:59.0

Pushed: 2018-01-16 23:32:33.0

Homepage: null

Size: 64

Language: Shell

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README

sysreqs

SystemRequirements for R packages

Introduction

Many R packages require external libraries or other external software to run. The SystemRequirements field in the DESCRIPTION file should declare these dependencies, as free form text. This makes it somewhat hard to create automatic builds of R packages, since it is hard to guess what software needs to be installed on the build machine.

The sysreqs project formalizes these requirements, and provides a database with API, that can be used to quickly find out what Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, brew, etc. packages or other external software needs to be installed to run or build R packages.

Database access

TODO

Supported platforms

Planned:

• Ubuntu Linux (recent releases)
• Debian Linux (recent releases)
• Fedora Linux (recent releases)
• RedHat and CentOS Linux (recent releases)
• Mac OS X with the brew package manager
• Windows

Database format

The sysreqs database is a JSON document store. Each document contains mappings for a single canonical system requirement. It contains both the mappings to SystemRequirements fields, and platform dependent packages or URLs.

Here is an example to make this clear. Many R packages require the libxml2 library. For installing these packages from source, the libxml2 development headers are also needed. Various R packages refer to libxml2 in different ways. E.g. igraph has simply libxml2 and XML has libxml2 (>= 2.6.3) in their SystemRequirements fields.

ibxml2": {
"sysreqs": "/libxml2/",
"platforms": {
  "DEB": {
    "runtime": "libxml2",
    "buildtime": "libxml2-dev"
  },
  "OSX/brew": null,
  "RPM": "libxml2",
  "Windows": {
    "32bit": [
      "ftp://ftp.zlatkovic.com/libxml/zlib-1.2.5.win32.zip",
      "ftp://ftp.zlatkovic.com/libxml/iconv-1.9.2.win32.zip",
      "ftp://ftp.zlatkovic.com/libxml/libxml2-2.7.8.win32.zip",
    ],
    "64bit": [
      "ftp://ftp.zlatkovic.com/libxml/64bit/zlib-1.2.8-win32-x86_64.7z",
      "ftp://ftp.zlatkovic.com/libxml/64bit/iconv-1.14-win32-x86_64.7z",
      "ftp://ftp.zlatkovic.com/libxml/64bit/libxml2-2.9.3-win32-x86_64.7z"
    ]
  }
}

Some notes:

• The sysreqs field can be a list, and its entries can be regular expressions (when starting and ending with a forward slash).
• Not all platforms have the same information, For DEB based Linux flavours (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) packages that can be installed via the host package manager are listed. For Windows, typically URLs that have to be downloaded and installed.
• null for OSX/brew means that nothing is needed, the system includes the requirement(s) by default.

API

TODO

Contributing

TODO

License

MIT © The R Consortium